Famine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Ten

   Jonah spent his next few weeks on the lecture circuit among the Eastern States.  Everywhere they sat in awe as he described the events of his day.  The past came to life with a flesh and blood speaker.  Things came to Jonah without effort once he began to search his mind.  His anecdotes came easier and easier.  With time he enriched his presentation with personalized stories.  It was less formal but wildly successful.

   Jonah returned to Owensboro where there was a package in his inbox.  Warren Crabtree had not known of its presence and knew nothing of what it might contain.  It bore no clue of who had sent it.  He took it out of its container.  It contained rolls of old film strips in round containers, outdated technology suitable only for an old-style projector.  Jonah was thankful that the museum had maintained an old working projector in their display of Educational Technology, Past and Present. That would work perfectly.  He received permission to take the projector to his house under the pretense of learning and teaching some local history buff just how to work something from the past.

   Jonah marveled that someone would use old roll film much like his teachers had used in his own youth.  Perhaps somebody wanted him to know something and they didn’t want others around him to have easy access to what they want Jonah to know.

   But there is was.  Articles and photos from an Owensboro Messenger-Inquirer from November 10, 2045, and a few days following. At first glance, they seemed to show the whole of Owensboro in flames.  But as Jonah went from photo to photo of burning houses, churches, small business, and some larger ones, something stood out on page after page. Why did Jonah not see it at first!

   There were no fire trucks dispatched to put out nearly all of the fires.  The only exceptions were when fires threatened government schools and government buildings.

   Then a little farther Jonah saw photos of uniformed O’Hair Youth carrying a banner with the words First Amendment written in bright red.  There were hundreds of them wielding clubs and hands raised while they shouted words long sense having fallen silent.  But the hatred those barbarians bore shouted from the pictures.

   Page after page Jonah saw uniformed thugs dragging people wearing Christian armbands into the streets and beating them without mercy.  They turned some of them over to the Owensboro Police, who were seen herding them into paddy wagons.  Some were driving away to destinations unknown.

   Here and there Jonah saw books mobs ransacking libraries from local Catholic schools that he had remembered so well.  They had plied them so higher than some local houses and torched them.  A small article complained that some local secular businesses undeserving had also gone up in flames.

   Pictures showed the main Catholic cemetery at Ninth and Crabtree Avenues with tombstones over turned or smashed.  A uniformed O’Hair Youth posed for a photo locking its gate while others surrounded the hallowed ground with concertina wire.  An article was written in support of its closing.  Local churches were no longer allowed to bury any more Christians on its grounds.  The same thing had been done to Rose Hill-Elmwood and the local Jewish cemetery on the edge of town.

   Funeral homes whose cliental had been almost all Christian were also closed or forced to refuse Christian clients.  Since most people now had themselves cremated in the local government facilities and their ashes spread over the countryside from the air, there was little need for traditional embalming services.

   Articles spoke of those arrested as Christian dissidents.  Further it reported that they were all found guilty of high crimes against the State and the First Amendment.  It never defined the law behind their arrests but with uncanny confidence predicted that they would be sentenced to Cryonic Exile for five thousand years.

   Other spin-off articles in support of the crackdown on Christians used file photos from the past of atrocities having nothing to do with them at all.  But they were faked.  Well, not really fake as such.  They were real enough but old enough that no one but someone like Jonah would know the difference.  One was of Armenians slaughtered by the Muslim Turks but used to report an Atrocity done by Christians.  Photos from Dachau were inserted into fake articles.  These were blamed on Christians per se, nothing said of the Nazi’s.

   Jonah then got curious about the date of November 10.  He entered it into his home computer and bang.

                   Kristallnacht on November 10, 1938!

   It hit Jonah like a baseball bat against his head.  He knew in an instant that all over the United States, local committees on Social—Cultural Ecology had used local O’Hair Youth and anti-Christian elements in a pogrom against Christians.  By that time in history there were by then enough Americans who would look the other way.  Law enforcement had been paid off to ignore local atrocities or had cooperated with anit-Christian elements.

   As Jonah got deeper into the stories, he noticed that no insurance companies paid off claims for damage caused by the rioters.  The local municipal taxing authorities continued to assess proper damaged Christian property at their previous rates as if they still were worth their previous value.

   Lawyers would not represent Christians in claims court against the occasional O’Hair Youth arrested for rioting or their direct actions against their properties.  It was like a black person in the Old South bringing an act against Whites.  There was no justice for Christians anymore.

   Then Jonah lit up.  He poured through the files and there was Michelle.  She was photographed giving aid and praying with someone injured in the pogrom.  O’Hair Youth just stood around her but not venting their wrath on her.  It was as if there was an unwritten law to let her alone.  So it was in photo after photo.   There in the midst of all the horror was his Michelle, giving assistance in defiance of the evil around her.  At any moment someone might have killed her.  She seemed to know no fear.

   There were conflicting accounts of Michelle’s whereabouts in this darker phase in local history.  The Christians must have begun to disappear from the streets in masse.  No photos of them in required armbands were apparent in articles he saw from articles just a few days later.

One thing that saddened Jonah was another front page article from the Messenger and Inquirer dated a week later.  One was a mass humiliation of a few Christian dissidents on Bon Harbor Hill and followed by even a larger number of Christians in mass recant of their faith.  Michelle stood in the distance in one of the photos.  Nobody touched her.

   So when they were strong enough, those like Dr. Boron grabbed what little pubic strength local Christians had.'

   Michelle was there during those times, but she herself was well protected by those who had loved her from their own youth.  They did nothing to prevent the events, but they made sure to protect her.

   The best Jonah could determine was that Christianity had moved underground just as sure as they had once had to inhabit the catacombs of Ancient Rome, place of the dead, where the pagan Romans would not go.

   Romans themselves even then were a decent people per se.  So were most Americans still.  They just didn’t want to make trouble any more than Romans kept out of trouble or Germans ignored atrocities.  Most of them were not active participants in Kristallnacht.

   Local people around Jonah must have forgotten America’s Kristallnacht.  It was a well-kept secret.